Career Framework

A ten-person company does not need stages. With three engineers and one designer, the founder sees everything everyone does. Raises get decided by recalling the past year for each person, and titles exist mostly because business cards need a line.

Past forty people the method breaks in three places at once. The founder no longer sees everyone's work. The reasoning behind each raise starts differing from person to person. And when hiring from outside, nobody can say what title the open role should carry.

At Pagedeck the problem surfaced first in a one-on-one. Theo, three years in, asked Grace where he stood and what came next. Grace said he was doing well, which was not an answer to the question. Theo wanted a map, not an evaluation: what the next position is, what has to be different about his work to get there, and who decides that and when. No document existed, so there was nothing to say. Five months later he came back holding an offer from another company.

Without that document three things fall apart on the company's side too. A job posting says senior engineer and every interviewer walks in with a different picture of what senior means. Review cycles finish and the results have nowhere to go, so the files pile up unread. And the only way to reward a strong practitioner is to make them a manager, which means putting the best engineer in meetings and, a few months later, losing both a good engineer and an inexperienced manager at the same time.

A career framework bundles those pieces into one document, and its central move is reversing the direction of judgment. Instead of assessing after the fact how good someone is, it writes down in advance what a person at each stage accomplishes, and then compares people to those sentences. The People axis follows a person from the job opening through to the exit and splits that path into nine branches; this one sits at growth. Hiring decides who comes in and compensation decides what they are paid, and between those two this document decides where a person can move.

Seven terms sit under career framework, in four branches: what divides people (structure), which directions are available (paths), how someone actually moves (movement), and what helps them move (support). The first two draw the map, and the last two move people around on it.

Structure builds the two axes of the map — one vertical, one horizontal.

1. Job level — the grade assigned by capability and scope of responsibility. This is the vertical axis. Most companies run five to seven levels and write a sentence or two describing what a person at each one does. Level three finishes assigned work on their own; level four decides what the work should be; level five solves problems that span several teams. The rule is to describe work rather than tenure, so someone five years in can sit at level three while someone three years in sits at level four.
2. Job family — the grouping of jobs that share a character, such as engineering, design, product, and sales. This is the horizontal axis, and it exists because level descriptions cannot be shared across jobs. The sentence describing a level four engineer and the sentence describing a level four designer cannot be the same sentence, so each family gets its own level table. What stays common is money: the same level carries the same pay range regardless of family.

Paths decide how many directions lead upward. There are two, and the dividing line is whether a person takes on other people.

1. Individual contributor track (IC track) — moving up through depth of expertise without managing anyone. Higher levels mean harder problems, not more direct reports. A level six engineer owns the hardest technical problems in the company and other engineers lean on that judgment, but that person does not write their reviews or set their pay.
2. Manager track — moving up by taking on people and organizations. The growth of the people on the team and the team's overall results become the manager's own results. Hands-on time shrinks and one-on-ones, hiring, and reviews take its place.

Running both tracks side by side solves one specific failure. When the only way up is a management job, a company has no way to reward a strong practitioner other than making them a manager. So the best engineer gets handed a team, spends their days on work they never wanted, and drifts away from the work they were good at. Companies that run both tracks set the pay ranges equal at equal levels. If the amounts differ, people read only one of the two paths no matter what the document says.

Movement covers changing position on the map. There are two, split by whether the move is upward or sideways.

1. Promotion — moving to a higher level or role. The process usually runs in four steps: a manager puts a candidate forward, evidence is collected showing the person has been working to the next level's sentences for the past two or three quarters, a group of managers reviews the case together, and pay is adjusted. The third step is a group step because managers calibrate differently. Let one manager decide alone and promotions cluster under whichever manager grades most generously.
2. Internal mobility — moving to a different team or job, often sideways at the same level. Someone who spent two years in customer support moves into product. For the company it means reusing a person who already knows the product and the customers, so they ramp faster than an outside hire. The team losing the person sees it differently, though, and if a manager can block the move the path stays theoretical. That is why the rules are written in advance: after a set number of months an employee can apply, and the current manager cannot veto it.

Support is what makes people actually move, and it holds one term. An individual development plan (IDP) records where a person wants to go, what they are missing today, and what they will do about it this quarter. If the level table is the standard applied across the whole company, this is the translation of that standard for one person. It works by picking a single sentence from the level four description that the person cannot yet deliver and choosing a piece of the next quarter's actual work to practice it on. Managers open it once a quarter in a one-on-one.

The four branches connect in a line. Structure draws the boxes, paths lay the routes between them, the development plan sets the assignment that moves someone toward the next box, and promotion or internal mobility makes the move official. Leave one piece out and the rest stall. With no level descriptions, every manager brings a different standard to the promotion review. With one track, the only goal anyone can write in a development plan is becoming a manager. With no mobility process, the person who wants to try different work goes looking for it outside the company.

"I want to move Theo to level four. Can you pull together three examples of him doing the 'decides what the work should be' part?"

Promotion is being judged on whether the person already delivers the written sentences, not on whether they asked for a raise.

"I don't want to manage people. Does that mean this is as far as I go here?"

A question about whether an IC track exists and, if it does, whether its pay actually climbs alongside the manager track.

"Don't put design level four and engineering level four side by side. The level descriptions differ by job family."

A reminder that the same level means the same pay range, not the same work.

Pagedeck wrote its first version of this document in the quarter it reached 45 people. Grace started it not out of a wish for more process but because three of the four people who left in the first half of that year said the same thing in their exit interviews: they could not tell what came next for them here.

The first version was thin. Four job families — engineering, design, product, sales — five levels, and three sentences per level. Those three sentences took six weeks. The time went into reconciling what people already believed rather than into polishing prose. Theo read level four as never getting stuck; Mia read it as choosing what to build. Both descriptions matched somebody already working at the company, so neither was wrong, and level four ended up written as two lines rather than one. The argument turned out to be worth more than the document. Until that meeting, four managers had been interviewing candidates with four different definitions of senior in their heads, and nobody had noticed.

The effect showed up in the next promotion review. Six candidates, four managers in a room, and the shape of the discussion had changed. Where the question used to be who had worked hardest, it was now whether there was evidence for the second sentence of level four. Four candidates moved up and two were held to the following quarter, and the two who were held could be told in a sentence what was missing. Those two sentences became the goals in their next development plans.

The most common mistake is reading a career framework as a tenure chart — three years in means level three, five years means level four, and time carries you upward on its own. The stages are ordered and pay climbs with them, so the reading is understandable. But what each stage describes is the scope of work delivered, not months served. Two people can spend the same three years and land in different boxes if one only completed assigned work while the other started deciding what the work should be. Run it as a tenure chart and two things happen together. There is no longer any basis for declining a request that rests on years served, and the people who grew fastest hit the ceiling their tenure allows and leave. What remains is a company where the set of people at high levels and the set of people doing strong work are two different sets.

The second frequent error is assuming that publishing the framework makes people grow on their own. Once the next stage is visible, the thinking goes, everyone will prepare for it. But the sentences in a level table are written to apply company-wide, which makes them abstract for any individual. Few people can read "solves problems that span several teams" and know what to do on Monday morning. So at companies that publish the document and stop there, nobody opens it six months later and traffic spikes only during promotion season. Making it work takes someone who translates that sentence into this person's next assignment during a one-on-one, and the development plan is where that translation gets written down. The difference between a company that has a framework and a company where the framework functions is not how refined the table is — it is whether that translation happens every quarter.